I'm fairly pessimistic about the future. Occupy Wallstreet was a total failure. A bigger version can still be a total failure. We've been in a cyberpunk dystopia since 9/11, totally and transparently owned by megacorporations. I can easily see an AI-powered police state dramatically wasting energy to dominate the population.
Just like the housing market which the government bailed out at our expense. And housing prices continue to outpace salaries. There's a strong possibility that this is a permanently-forced inefficiency.
Nothing's inevitable. And as for "building a mind", while it depends on precisely what you mean by "mind", it's totally possible that only a biological brain can produce minds as we understand the word "mind". Building AGI doesn't necessarily mean building a mind. And since thoughts seem to be properties of "matter", and there seem to be rules about which configurations of matter produce mind, we don't necessarily know that there are other configurations that can produce minds. We might produce something else equally interesting which still is not a mind.
LibreOffice is generally better anyway. I'll admit there are some formatting things I find smoother in Office, but overall it's bloatware and it keeps crashing. I really hate Office and avoid it whenever I can.
fully conscious according to any test I can think of
There's no such thing as an actual test for consciousness in machines. We can do tests on animals to see if their sensory experience includes self-awareness, but we're already operating on the assumption that they have feelings and sensory experience because they have a brain and nervous system like us, and they're all directly related to us (as all organisms are). But that's totally different from designing a machine which mimics (or predicts/auto-completes) our observable behavior and then assuming that it "doesn't like" something or does anything "for fun."
What sucks is that some idiots are going to start falling for this. And eventually software will be given human rights, which actually means that the software's owners will have extra rights compared to the rest of us.
I'm fairly pessimistic about the future. Occupy Wallstreet was a total failure. A bigger version can still be a total failure. We've been in a cyberpunk dystopia since 9/11, totally and transparently owned by megacorporations. I can easily see an AI-powered police state dramatically wasting energy to dominate the population.